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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Twenty. Let that number sit a moment before this Author proceeds any further. Twenty women in the care of the Northern Trust of Durham and Darlington underwent mastectomies that were entirely unnecessary – operations they need not have endured, scars they need not bear, grief they need not carry. The National Health Society trust now admits that of five hundred and fourteen cases reviewed, three hundred and fifteen patients suffered harm, seventy-seven of them significantly so, and one soul did not survive at all. The incoming chief executive offers an apology that he himself concedes no words can adequately express. This Author does not doubt his sincerity. She doubts, rather, that sincerity alone will comfort a woman who wakes each morning to a body permanently altered by a surgeon’s avoidable mistake. A review of up to ten thousand cases dating back to 2015 now looms. The nation awaits it with a dread that is entirely justified.
To affairs of a different but no less grave character: the Secret Intelligence Service has this Friday – in open court, before three of the Kingdom’s most senior judges – accepted without reservation that it gave evidence founded upon lies to not one, not two, but three separate courts. Senior officers were, the admission runs, repeatedly dishonest. One shudders to imagine what phrase might describe behaviour beyond “repeatedly dishonest” had they tried harder. The case concerns a violent neo-Nazi agent whose abuses were first exposed by the Broadcasting Society, and whose handlers apparently found it preferable to deceive the judiciary than to acknowledge the obvious. Whether contempt of court proceedings shall follow is now a matter for the judiciary to resolve. This Author notes, with the restraint she can still occasionally muster, that an intelligence service caught lying to courts is a rather more spectacular scandal than anything the ton has managed this season.
And now, a story that intersects tragedy and the Metropolitan Constabulary in ways that should make that institution exceedingly uncomfortable. The sisters of Nicholas Brandram – the man accused of being the so-called “Putney pusher,” that jogger of infamy alleged to have shoved a woman into the path of a bus on Putney Bridge in 2017 – have told the Broadcasting Society that their brother was innocent. He had, they say, a withered leg from an old army injury, a prominent military tattoo, blue eyes where the attacker had brown, no connection to Putney whatsoever, and evidence placing him in his Bond Street office at the time. He even provided a DNA sample voluntarily and received no results. He was found dead on Tuesday. His family say he took his own life after months of immense pressure. The Metropolitan Constabulary has acknowledged the “strain” of being investigated and made a mandatory referral to the watchdog. This Author considers that a rather modest response to rather enormous consequences.
To The Palace now, where the Earl of Spencer – brother to the late Princess Diana – has furnished the public with fresh extracts from his memoir, claiming that His Majesty the King “sounded giddily elated” upon telephoning him after the Princess’s death in 1997, and resembled nothing so much as a lottery winner. The Palace has responded with a statement of considerable diplomatic elegance, observing that “fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory.” In other words: the Earl is grieving and may have misremembered. The Duke of Sussex’s representatives decline to comment, which is itself a comment. This Author observes merely that it takes a particular species of courage – or its near neighbour – to publish, nearly thirty years on, one’s recollection of a telephone call made in the immediate aftermath of the worst night of a family’s life.
Finally, in the arena of political theatre, Lady Badenoch has summoned lawyers to examine whether the government’s decision to cut Wandsworth Council’s funding by some £84 million annually – precipitating a proposed 94% council tax rise, which is the sort of figure one generally associates with comic exaggeration rather than local governance – can be legally challenged. She accuses the Progressive Assembly of redistributing funds away from areas that did not vote for them, which the government describes rather more blandly as fixing an “outdated funding system.” Both may be simultaneously correct, which is perhaps the most alarming possibility of all. Meanwhile, Lord Healey was in Dublin on Friday urging Continental Alliance finance ministers not to lock British firms out of the new “Made in Europe” industrial programme – a scheme designed to shield European manufacturing from the Celestial Empire‘s competition. That the Kingdom must now petition to be included in arrangements it might once have shaped from within is, this Author reflects, a particular flavour of irony that only Brexit could have brewed.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.